Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship

MI Publishes Article on AssayMark System

May 16, 2013

The Microfluidic Innovations team recently published a technical article on Software Programmable Lab on a Chip devices. The article describes the power of MI's approach to assay design at microfluidic scale and how the flexibility of the AssayMark System can shorten assay design time, cost and effort. The article explains how you can quickly reap the benefits of scaling your assays to microfluidics, reducing sample volume, assay time and increasing your sensitivity and specificity, and demonstrates the flexibility on four diverse assays: glucose level detection, enzyme kinetics research, particle sorting and bacteria culturing and synchronization. Here is the abstract from the article:
Current lab-on-a-chip (LoC) devices are assay-specific and are custom-built for each single experiment. Performing an experiment requires scientists or engineers to go through the time-consuming process of designing, fabricating, and testing a chip before conducting the actual experiment. This prolonged cycle can take months to complete, increasing effort and cost and reducing productivity. Similarly, minor modifications to an assay protocol re-incur the overheads of the design cycle. In this paper, we develop a multi-purpose, software-programmable Lab-on-a-Chip(SPLoC), where the user simply writes or downloads a program for each experiment. We describe the components necessary to realize the SPLoC, which include a high-level programming language, an abstract instruction set, a runtime and control system, and a microfluidic device. We describe two key features of our high-level language compiler, and describe a novel variable-volume variable-ratio mixer. Finally, we demonstrate our SPLoC on four diverse, real-world assays.

February 24, 2015

This Wednesday, February 25, representatives of VisionTech Partners and VisionTech Angels will travel to West Lafayette to participate in Purdue University’s faculty “Pitch Day,” part of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Academy. Our role: to serve as technology commercialization and business start-up experts for the ten Purdue faculty members who will pitch their ideas.